The authors gratefully acknowledge the valuable assistance of many
people who commented on preliminary drafts of this book. In
particular, we thank Loyce Adams, Bill Coughran,
Matthew Fishler, Peter Forsyth,
Roland Freund, Gene
Golub, Eric Grosse, Mark Jones, David Kincaid, Steve Lee, Tarek
Mathew, Noël Nachtigal, Jim Ortega, and David Young for their
insightful comments. We also thank Geoffrey Fox for initial
discussions on the concept of templates, and Karin Remington for
designing the front cover.

This work was supported in part by DARPA and ARO under contract number
DAAL03-91-C-0047, the National Science Foundation Science and
Technology Center Cooperative Agreement No. CCR-8809615, the Applied
Mathematical Sciences subprogram of the Office of Energy Research,
U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract DE-AC05-84OR21400, and the
Stichting Nationale Computer Faciliteit (NCF) by Grant CRG 92.03.